I have to confess that as a tech reporter I know too little about the Bitcoin. I found myself skipping any news or articles about it and kind of defined this topic as “out of my league stuff”. So when I first met Tom and his bitcoin startup, my brain was still shut off until he said :” You can launch a coin with our platform with zero crypto knowledge.”
Ta-dah!
Koinify is a crowdfunding platform where developers and merchants can issue their own cryptocurrency. Just like you can crowdfund a T-shirt project on Kickstarter, you can now crowdfund a game/app/community with cryptocurrency.
First of all, you can launch a Koin for your app or game or community and set a fundraising target. Secondly, you can engage your backers with the “Koin Power” you define for them, like a reward or some exclusive features. Lastly you are funded and get viral! It will be a perfect way to gain funding and users at the same time. That is real “growth hacking”, right? Furthermore, the platform is built on Bitcoin / Counterparty which means your Koins are usable with any counterparty compatible wallet.
Co-founder Tom Ding is a Bitcoin fanatic, he started Koinify this February after leaving eBay. “I believe cryptocurrency will be the most fundamental megatrend for the next 20-30 years and I will bet my career on it.” As a startup entrepreneur, Tom seeks to strike a balance between true innovation, creating value and right timing in the Bitcoin space. “Crowdfunding great projects/startups meets all of these 3 criteria.”
Unlike most other Bitcoin startups that are “out of my league”, Koinify will extremely focus on user experience that serves broader audience, rather than the small group of people with cryptocurrency knowledge. “Very few companies in this space did this well enough. We want to make the platform easier than Kickstarter that everyone wants to get involved in.”
Koinify received its seed investment from Chinese funds, Zhenfund and Ceyuan Ventures, recently. The founding team are alumni from Ripple, Oracle, with advisors from Stanford and Fintech companies. They have already got some customers from the game and app developer community, and will officially launch in September.
By the way Koinify is still recruiting and they pay the team members in bitcoins or the coins they created themselves. The startup also claims to adopt an extremely flat structure, where they make hashtags like #ruby #photoshop #growthhacking for everyone instead of the job titles.
“One of the greatest lessons I learned from my corporate experience is that you don’t want to have any ‘title’ centered culture. Everyone has different combination of things to contribute, and a title is simply misleadingly concentrating power at the top,” said Tom.
Now reserve some Koin for free or talk to the team here.
Leave a comment